Independent Voters Lean Towards Trump After Biased ABC Debate

Although Kamala Harris has been proclaimed the winner of her first presidential debate with Donald Trump, it appears that after the debate, even with both moderators being accused of joining on her behalf, Trump made strides with independent voters.

Breitbart News reports:

Although pundits declared Vice President Kamala Harris the clear winner of Tuesday night’s debate, former President Trump won six of ten undecided voters in a Reuters focus group. Harris only won three. A New York Times survey of undecideds had similar results.

Some political pundits predicted the debate would have little effect on the election. According to a Reuters sampling, however, six out of ten undecided voters said they were leaning towards Trump due to Harris’s “vague” answers and because they “trusted” Trump more on the economy, the top issue of the 2024 cycle.

While many viewers believed the moderators were trying to steer the conversation in a way that favored Harris, it seems like their efforts may have backfired — especially among undecided voters.

One focus group member from Nevada that had been leaning towards Harris before the debate said, “I felt like the whole debate was Kamala Harris telling me why not to vote for Donald Trump instead of why she’s the right candidate.”

Breitbart continues:

Sixty-one percent of likely voters believe the next president should represent a major change from the Biden-Harris administration, while only 25 percent said Harris represented that change, a Times/Siena College poll found Sunday. A majority said Trump represents the change.

A former Democrat from Wisconsin said, “Trump’s pitch was a little more convincing than hers. I guess I’m leaning more on his facts than her vision. When Trump was in office — not going to lie — I was living way better. I’ve never been so down as in the past four years. It’s been so hard for me.”

The economy has consistently been listed as the top priority for the majority of likely voters, with the majority of them expressing discontent with its current condition, and expressing that they felt more financially secure under the Trump administration.

An independent voter from New York explained, “When asked directly by the moderators, Kamala didn’t even make an effort to defend the administration’s policies at all. She can’t. It’s indefensible, so she pivoted…but they totally rewrote all of Trump’s immigration policies year one. I would’ve liked to have seen an explanation for the country as to why they did that.”

In an interview on The Faulkner Focus, the president of communications firm Maslansky + Partners clarified the phenomenon she was seeing among Independents in real time — especially when it came to crime and immigration.

“I was really, really surprised because the intensity of the independent support was there for Donald Trump and I didn’t expect it. Independents are tracking very much with Republicans. They’re looking for a couple of things. They’re looking for answers on immigration, they’re looking for answers on the economy. They want to hear that things will get better for them and they also want change from what is happening right now. One of the most important things they were looking for last night from Kamala Harris is how are you going to make it different?”

Fox News reports:

The focus group comprised seven Democrats, five independents and five Republicans, and was represented by blue, yellow and red lines, respectively. When Trump spoke of the rising crime at the hands of illegal immigrants, the yellow line monitoring the independent reaction rose drastically in Trump’s favor, overlapping with the red Republican line.